Backdoors won't weaken your encryption, wails FBI boss. And he's right. They won't – they'll fscking torpedo it FBI head honcho Christopher Wray is rather peeved that you all think the US government is trying to weaken cryptography, privacy, and online security, by demanding backdoors in encryption software. During a session at the International Conference on Cyber Security at Fordham University, New York, Wray backed a proposal mooted …
Actually never saw LoTR in a movie theatre
We saw all of them - all on the last showing of the day so as to avoid having croth-fruit present (makes for a less-interrupted viewing).
And then we bought the directors cut of each of them to watch at home (for a number of years we watched them all back to back over the Christmas holidays).
I'd love for them to do some of The Silmarillion but I suspect that it's too broad a scope for them to touch.
Not that I'm a LOTR geek at all.. (but it was probably the first fantasy book[1] I read - by the age of 11 I'd read them all multiple times (including Silmarillion). However, I didn't read The Hobbit until doing my English O level.
[1] Of very, very many - I'm averaging one book/day at the moment.
"Yes, I usually sit through the credits because I'm a camera/lenses geek and I wanna know what camera and lenses they used to shoot the movie. :-)"
Spoiler alert: It was a RED camera and Zeiss glass (or that British company that makes really good cinema lenses I can't remember)
Just use the gov't MILNET (or ARPANET2) or a wide variety of other SCI networks that the US runs.
Close down the inner-tubes and force everyone to use a non Huawai phone not made anywhere else except in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, etc. That'll take care of needs for 5G forever.
Maybe we can piggy-back on the Great Firewall of China for all our security. Altho I'm guessing Trumpf has a lucrative deal with the FSB/IRA.
Watta world we live in now. It's been fun, comrades.
It is the nature of gummints to become oppressive police states.
It is the responsibility of citizens to TAKE ACTION TO PREVENT IT.
This is a lot like PEST CONTROL. Watch what happens over time if you fail to spray, bait, and/or trap.
That's right. The RATS and ROACHES will win. So we have to do what we MUST to prevent it.
It is the nature of gummints to become oppressive police states.It is the responsibility of citizens to TAKE ACTION TO PREVENT IT.
But.. Didn't you vote for Trump? Don't you still support him? How is that doing your civic duty to stop such people being in government?
"How do you propose to ensure that the hardworking men and women of law enforcement sworn to protect you and your families maintain lawful access to the information they need to do their jobs?"
I propose firing the next computer illiterate who insists I am not allowed securely encrypt business transactions to prevent others from spending my money.
The question is a complete red-herring. I have information in my head. It is, to all intents and purposes, encrypted because only I have the key and access. There is no way for "the hardworking men and women of law enforcement " to access it without my permission. This is a situation that has existed since crime began, and yet "the hardworking men and women of law enforcement " have somehow managed.
So how is encrypted information on a phone different?
Who needs high-tech mind reading probes??? People get very talkative if it averts a red-hot poker someplace sensitive!
Failing that, I hear water boarding gets you Grade A intel on The Bad Guys (TM)
Applies equally to digital or verbal data.. Whether or not you're believed depends on verification of the intel. Or some bastard just enjoys the wet screams...
Just Enough,
" .. I have information in my head. It is, to all intents and purposes, encrypted because only I have the key and access. ..."
You are forgetting the oft quoted https://www.xkcd.com/538/
Decryption of 'Your Information' is easier because there *is* a method that can access a built-in 'Backdoor' !!!
This sort of demonstrates the problem with all forms of Backdoors !!!
;) :)
Not forgetting it at all. What I'm saying is the principle is exactly the same.
In the case of xkcd's example; hitting someone with a wrench until they tell you the encryption password is no different from hitting them with a wrench until they tell you any information you may have.
To which I always ask, "What do you do with a masochist, who would GET OFF on getting hit with a wrrnch, or a wimp, who would faint at the mere sight of the wrench?" Either way, they're not gonna tell you anything useful.
Have dealt with many wimps (used to be their king at one stage!) - many would fold long before they fainted. Not all though, some have amazing resilience and pain thresholds well above what is considered normal (also a very strong fear of pain - I can tolerate a lot it seems, but the thought of so much as one of my cats hairs landing on me almost gives me a panic attack).
As to masochists, well, any torturer worth the name will get round them. Two simple rules about torture. One is that the info gathered is probably worthless, and two - and the most important one - every one breaks.
"Have dealt with many wimps (used to be their king at one stage!) - many would fold long before they fainted."
Then they aren't real wimps. REAL wimps would faint first, meaning it's impossible to get anything from them as anything even remotely resembling violence (like an angry dog bark) would make them a gibbering mess if not outright unconscious.
"...every one breaks."
Depends on what you mean by breaking. Given people have willingly committed suicide instead of surrendering, I would think there are some who would simply endeavor themselves, regardless of circumstances, to make it so that when they break, they shatter and become utterly useless in any event. Even if totally bound and helpless, they'd probably tap hysterical strength to tear their own bodies apart and bleed out.
either an idiot or a fascist.
A concise but accurate description of the Cabinet selected by new UK PM Johnson. It's an inclusive 'or', of course, so they can be both - see, for example, Priti Patel, the Home Secretary.
So it's only a matter of time over here. Won't be long before sealed envelopes and sticky tape on parcels are outlawed.
You know the simplest solution is going to be to mandate this in the Intel ME / AMD PSP. Phones already have mandated kill switches in the low-level firmware, so precedent is already set. Short term all you can do is try to move away from hardware like that and hope that these morons will be content with catching 90% of the non-technical traffic -- basically Linux/BSD on RISC-V or Power is they only way you're not going to be leaking your private data and conversations everywhere. Oh and mobiles are right out -- time to start practicing "I don't own a mobile phone because of the privacy dangers, please call me at my home/office number".
Stalin and Hitler would both be so proud. To have achieved mass deployment of the tools required to spy on the populous under the guise of "safety", then turn the spying on after said tools are so ubiquitous that eschewing them will kill the economy, now THAT's an achievement for the history books.
in general you still need physical access to hardware to "take advantage" of any built-in CPU back doors.
and such a back door could NEVER reliably decrypt encrypted traffic, not if it's done in SOFTWARE. Use of clever stream ciphers might prevent it entirely, since nothing would really be stored in RAM - encrypt or decrypt the stream as it passes by...
byte -> hash -> lookup table -> new hash -> rotate table with new hash -> encrypted/decrypted output
so simple! TKIP kinda works this way, too.
I was referring to the fact that Intel/AMD might be quite willing to come to a quiet, closed-door truce with the FBI that goes something like this:
Since no one knows what's in our magic DRM black boxes anyway, and for bonus points no one can edit out the malware bits we're secretly adding (by design, signing keys and all that), we'll simply snoop on the OS for anything that looks like a key and quietly exfiltrate it over the network. HTTPS using DoH would be nigh undetectable.
The research on key detection is already done. The black boxes are already in place and have access to memory for some asinine "reason" (excuse) I can't even recall at this point. The only thing missing is the kickback to the vendor to activate the malware (or threat of rubber hosing, though I suspect "we'll ban Huawei if you just do this for us" is a powerful motivator...)
One of the (nominal) points of the Intel Management Engine is that you can remotely control the computer, even when it's off. In other words, it's meant to undermine everything you just said(and with Intel-qwalitee security, being a person of interest almost guarantees you're screwed). AMD's PSP is less helpful, but I still wouldn't assume you need physical access to plant an OS-proof bug in there.
What we are seeing here has kind of happened before. In the 19th century there was a Catholic clergyman named Manning whose desire to rise to the top resulted in a degree of sliminess and sycophancy at which a Jacob Rees-Mogg could only wonder.
Manning wanted to be a Cardinal. Cardinals are appointed by the Pope. So Manning became ultra-Papist.
But Popes are surrounded by expert flatterers, who speak the language. How could Manning distinguish himself against such powerful opposition? His solution was near-genius. He aligned himself with the idea of Papal infallibility.
No need to find excuses to visit Rome constantly (though he did find an agent there.) How could you flatter a Pope more than suggest he is infallible? And yet it doesn't look like plain flattery because it hides under a veneer of Catholic doctrine.
So Manning became a Cardinal...
Barr seems to be trying the same thing. He has suggested that Trump should have even more power and be a kind of dictator, because Trump is so wonderful. Trump laps it up. And every idea that enters Trump's rather inadequate mind, Barr hails as the Second Coming. Including encryption backdoors.
Of course when it was clear Manning would be a cardinal he acquired his own train of bootlickers and bottom kissers. As Barr becomes associated with ultra-Trumpism, expect more people who know better to support his, and Trump's, idiocy. It won't affect them. They have people to deal with it. But the money, the fame, the well paid directorships, the high fees for public speaking will surely follow.
And now Johnson is in a position to go down exactly the same route. He's going to go full Barr. After all, it means the British government can uncover wrongthink too.
Trump is becoming a Mikado, and we, the ordinary people of the world, are all fucked.
I guess this is a rant, but it's a rant based on historical parallels.
Fair comment about rerum novarum
But my point stands, because if the Pope had not been in favour of it, I doubt Manning would have been.
Manning was doubtless capable, but the effort he put into self promotion showed that he didn't regard himself as someone who (like, say, John Fisher at the Admiralty) would rise to the top purely on merit.
My point was a general one about people who are so obsessed with obtaining high status that they will even go for credo quia impossibile est as doctrine if it furthers their aim. Barr and co., like that Australian politician (and the Brexiters for that matter) are adopting precisely that principle. If the boss thinks something impossible can be done, stuff reality.
It used to be the Telegraph that made jokes about union handbooks suspending the laws of physics, but today it's the Right that seems to inhabit the alternative reality universe.
And there's your work of genius right there.
They've managed to redefine how everyone thinks about politics so that the far left is Stalin/Mao while the far right is Hitler/Caesar and to convince everyone that we need a "moderate" who is somewhere in between the two...
Anyone who suggests that, you know, maybe totalitarianism *isn't* the way to go is ignored, ridiculed, or slammed with waves of patently false accusations until the retire from the public eye depending on what seems likely to shut them up the quickest.
Rubber hoses? Why do they think they are entitled to access every scrap of communication? It was well under 100 years where cops were able to 'wiretap' communications, and even then only if criminals used phones and didn't speak in code.
If encryption is backdoored and people meet in a dark corner of a park at night, I guess he'll insist on the government's right to have a drone follow every person as they walk around, so it can spy on any conversations that person may have. After all, if it is in the interests of law enforcement it must be a good thing, right citizen?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
